Encouragement

How do you know your team is making progress? And how can you support them in doing so? I think it is not that hard.

One technique is to observe what they are doing and how they operate. Keep a log of your observations in particular of successes and to a lesser degree of the failures. Of course not in the sense of big brother. But more in the sense of helping people realize where they are coming from, what journey they have already behind them, what successes they had, etc.

A few weeks ago I noticed that one of my teams started to use a backlog for prioritization and planning and a burndown graph for tracking progress. Recently I observed the first stand-up meeting that took place in the team area instead of taking place in a meeting room with everybody sitting down.

It is successes like these, and acknowledging these, that helps people seeing things in perspective and understand how they are moving ahead. Encourage your team if you see positive things happening!